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excerpt: Notes from the Middle World

NOTES FROM THE MIDDLE WORLD

Haymarket Books

Contents

DANCING.......................................................................................................................................................xi
1 MAKING BEING On Arts and Culture...........................................................................................................................1
2 MANDELA'S SMILE Glimpses from the Mirror of our Time.......................................................................................................19
3 OBAMANDELA..................................................................................................................................................41
4 IMAGINING AFRICA............................................................................................................................................53
5 THE AFRIKANER AS AFRICAN....................................................................................................................................71
6 ON "PROGRESS"...............................................................................................................................................85
7 THE PITY AND THE HORROR.....................................................................................................................................95
8 THE NOMADIC CONVERSATION with Mahmoud Darwish...............................................................................................................111
9 HOW WE KILL, KILL, KILL.....................................................................................................................................115
10 YOU SCREWS!................................................................................................................................................125
11 NOTES FROM THE MIDDLE WORLD................................................................................................................................135
12 OF CAMELS AND DOGS AND RATS WHEN WALKING THE WORDS / STAGING THE SELF Or: What it Is Like to Live with Somebody Very Much Like Myself.....................157
13 SELF-PORTRAIT/DEATHWATCH A Note on Autobiotrophy..........................................................................................................187
14 FOR MICHAEL FRIED Paris, December 21, 2004................................................................................................................207
15 TO BRING TO BOOK...........................................................................................................................................211

Chapter One

MAKING BEING
On Arts and Culture

First man moves, then he reflects, and then he encircles with words the
things seen.

It has always been peculiar to European cultures-not unique, but preponderantly
so-to conquer, subdue, explore, expand, and exploit; later
to maintain the conquered territories as sources of raw materials or as
potential markets; to loot and gut the cultures found there, and then to
collect their "artifacts" so as to "understand" the broken toys, the images
and the relics of a broken spirit, and ascribe a "meaning" to them. Anthropology,
ethnology, even our modern-day "multiculturalism"-however
noble and generous the attitudes of the people involved-are
manifestations of greed, the urge for power over the rest of the world,
the need to catalogue the "Other" and relegate him to a position of
being at best, "untouched by time," but always inferior. It would seem
that the West has to undo in order to comprehend.

A softer side to this pornographic policy of conquest and appropriation
of the "Other" motivated by Western needs now clothed in the
exigencies of a global market economy would be the contemporaneous
effort to promote "exchanges," to "protect him against the rapacious
West," to provide him with the means to autonomy and "authenticity."
This is by and large the Western affliction that has shaped and profoundly
malformed the world; its latest expression is the Bush doctrine
that reaffirms the arrogance and the purported right of the
powerful to subject the world to the spreading of freedom-"for its
own good," we are told sanctimoniously, but in fact for the base appetites
of global power.

As an African, I find it demeaning that the outside world should
come to catalogue, study, and "understand" Africa and its art; I find it
equally objectionable that Africa's artistic expressions and attempts to
shape a history and an identity, now more by way of denouncing our endemic
corruption and the failure of our governing and economic systems,
should then be patronized as exotic examples of freedom and
magic. These approaches are never innocent and they are not unbiased;
it cannot be done without the baggage of cultural assumptions bred
from specific histories and conditions brought by the protagonists. The
crudeness of the conditioned measuring tool assessing our differences
ultimately destroys the object of investigation; the unexamined paternalism
of the do-gooder finally humiliates the adopted artist.

I bring no answers to the questions of how cultural relations between
the North and the South ought to be conducted or even whether
they need to be formulated at all. However, I believe movement forward
lies in the way we put the questions. Truth lies in the road (maybe
in ambush), for how can we prejudge the contours of the destination
that will be shaped by our getting there? Traveling creates its own landscapes,
and that goes for the migration of ideas as well. The reassuring
thing is that one does always end up with a destination. Naturally, on
the way out, as maverick mortal, I'd be inclined to say "we must," "we
ought to"; I'd even be inclined to stitch my own speculative "truths" as
patchwork lining inside the dark and suffocating coat of Certainty, if
only to use as secret maps.

Instead of providing answers and purveying "truths" my intention
will be to say something about the problematic of art and culture in
Africa at present, and how these express or interact with notions of
identity; therefore about the connections between artistic creativity
and identity consciousness and the tension between arts and politics.

I am taken back to an experience I had a number of years ago, it
must have been October 2003, when I visited a major show of African
masks, artifacts, and other ritual objects in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition
was organized by the Goethe Institute and financed by the
Banco do Brasil, and consisted of pieces culled from German anthropological
museums. I was upset and angry to find those magnificent
shards and fragments and remnants of largely interrupted traditions-saved
from termites and mold, it is true, although still imperceptibly
stained by the mystery of time-now alienated from the
kingdoms where they were made and cleansed from their native surroundings,
removed from the sacred groves and therefore turned
away from their intended functions. "Statues, like men, were made to
die," Alberto da Costa e Silva wrote in an excellent text illuminating
the exhibition.

I remember that part of what lit my gut to sputter was a "justification"
reproduced in the catalogue. It quoted a text found in the Archives
of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin:

At times such as ours, which with a rough hand destroys countless primitive
tribes and furrows the surface of the earth in all directions ... (we are)
responsible to coming generations to preserve as much as possible of that
which still remains from the ages of humanity's childhood and youth [in
order] to aid the understanding of the development of the human spirit.
What is destroyed now will be irredeemably lost to the future.

One should not even bother to italicize words (concepts?) such as
"primitive," "responsible," "coming generations," "humanity's childhood,"
etc. But what shameless paternalism! Who gave the cultural
predators of the North the right to custody of the cultures of others?

In that same "justification" one may read in passing how fifty thousand
objects looted during the war by the Soviets from German museums
were returned from St. Petersburg following the reunification of
Germany, and one knows sadly that no "artifact" or "fetish" would ever
be considered as having been stolen from Africa and therefore a return
is out of the question. (Yes, but if these were handed back-to whom
and under what conditions? How does one give Africa back to itself
when it depends on handouts for survival? The indignity and injustice
of depriving these objects of a "native" or "home" death will remain until
such time as Africa can reassert itself and reclaim its heritage).

* * *

Why were these works, torn from their environments of "collective altars
or domestic shrines"-dixit da Costa-kept in ethnographic museums
and not simply exposed as the works of art they are among other
artworks of the world? Can it be that they'd be out of place in an art
museum because we've forgotten that all art is related to the sacred?

Thinking back now on that exhibition, I'm reminded that the
problems and equations around identity and responsibility and magic
and sharing probably always existed. For, apart from the quite stunning
formal and inventive beauty of the pieces I saw there, I was struck by
their power. Nearly every object had a singular presence. Even when abstract,
strange, or with gaze averted, their there-ness continued to
speak and to interrogate us. They spoke of power and of sacrifice, of the
unsayable also-but more importantly, in this attempt to bridge the
gap between life and beyond-life (or other life, or other-than-life) they
told us about the fears and the dreams, sometimes futile, of being alive.
In fact, they were mute or stilled manifestations of identity. Maybe this
is the magic of the human condition: to be poised on that cusp of a cry
of anguish and shout of defiance; to know that we are finite and fragile,
and yet strive to communicate with the silent stillness of otherness.
And in this there is communality beyond the demarcations of the ages,
of styles, of other allegiances and interpretations.

Movement precedes thinking is a tenet of Tibetan wisdom. It is, in
my limited experience, a physical imperative to move if you want to
think. We have to be in motion for the thinking to take shape and not
the other way around. Static thinking (plotting, cogitating) before implementing
the ideas normally denotes another process-rather, a different
hierarchy of intentions. When thinking precedes movement it
is usually informed by control, by the intended search for given
solutions-and this can lead to the establishment of dogma. Down
this road may beckon the manipulation of perceived identity within
larger contexts for purposes of power politics. The obverse may be that
when movement initiates and opens thinking we are not only courting
the possible advent of the unknown (that, after all, may be upsetting
and inhibiting)-but we are also putting ourselves in a humble or
learning relationship to the knowledge and experiences of others. We
bring, we test, we transmit, but we also change and allow ourselves to
be changed.

In the movement of thinking (and sometimes of thoughts) and in
the thinking awareness of physical and/or cultural displacement, or at
least of its potential, artistic creativity is born. Artistic creativity is the
movement of perceptions, of bringing about new combinations of past
and present, of realizing how new the old can be (and sometimes how
prematurely old and static the purportedly new is), of projecting future
shapes-and thus helping to shape the future. This is done through interactions
with other cultural expressions or the expressions of other
cultures, by reciprocal imitation, by undergoing influences. Those who
are often feared and even detested by society, because, as da Costa put it
in the catalogue, "they control fire, wood or words," undertake these
travels, sometimes to the end of the night.

The questions I'm trying to bring into focus do not have fixed outlines;
rather, their positioning and possible elucidation are subject to
accelerations provoked by events and new or modified insights-Africa
is always changing-or sometimes they gather in eddying pools
of reflection, maybe stagnation: another reason for moving, if only to
shatter the surface image and to rid oneself of the stench of self-serving
bullshit in the nostrils. Chekhov wrote in his Notebooks that the dead
do not know shame, but that they stink terribly. To be alive is to keep
moving, even as a carrier of shame.

And when one says movement one is talking rhythms and patterns,
contrasts and contradictions and contestations, maybe conflict, hybridism
and survival consciousness, the intensified interaction between
the known and the unknown. Uncertainty is written on the horizon of
the nomad. The sky with its lines of invisible stitching to nothingness
becomes a familiar companion-always respected, sometimes feared.
Breaks and jumps will jolt you awake, as brief loss and questioning and
enlightenment. You will be like an old Amhara at morning prayers
when it is still dark over the hills, resting your chin in the fork of your
long staff, dozing off because of the acrid smoke and interminable
prayers, to crash from meditation to the fucked-up-ness of the world.

Identity is then a vector of interaction.

"Who are you?" will be the first question. You turn around, look at
yourself, and wonder, because the question is unfair. Is he speaking to
me? Isn't identity the ultimate intimate stranger?

The rest is culture. I mean: it is the residue and the backdrop of
the known. Culture is the receptacle of the riches of received (or
stolen) certainties. Certainty, as we know, easily slides into Orthodoxy
(with a nudge or two from those with vested interests), and this
Security is customarily hoisted on a pedestal as Truth. Truth,
strangely enough, even when enshrining the expression of shared
convictions ("Truth we can believe in," as CNN might say), must be
only and One to survive. It can brook no bastards. Diversity is not
Truth's favorite lover. It has weak loins and feels threatened by that
which has a propensity for abandoning itself in lovemaking the better
to encompass and suffocate you. It is very difficult for Truth's power
to imagine being divided or shared. Hence the potential-indeed, the
predisposition-for conflict and the glorification of the manly virtues
of combativeness and possession.

One could perhaps argue that "culture" is the other shape of identity,
another plane of the mask, larger and shared (we all have it): reassuring
us because it makes us all alike as if hewed from one trunk. All
thinking has been thought then, and movement will now be merely exercising
the figures of conquest and of submission, if need be five times
a day facing the East.

How do we in Africa go about fostering appropriate linkages between
creativeness on the one hand and the challenges of managing
the tensions associated with citizenship and identities on the other?
How can we strengthen the civic role of the arts in relation to the politics
of citizenship and identity? How, and in which ways, can narrative
(private and public histories) be recognized as constitutive of identity?
What are the complex relationships between man and the spaces of his
past and his present?

Is the enactment of the holistic nature of human existence and its
relations to the Other constituted by creative activity? We are the
only animals, as far as we know, who imagine and invent ourselves.
We seem to need this projected dimension, this dépassement de soi, in
order to survive; also, to remember ourselves and thus to commemorate
the ancestors and to talk to them. We could say that this link to
the "sacred," if that is what it is, by itself creates a sense of shared identity.
Art may be our way of darkening the communal threshold by trying
to cross it, making of it something more problematical than just a
wedge of wood in the shape of a deaf coffin. The unattainable elsewhere
may be at the root of our sense of incompleteness and therefore
of much existential suffering, and we need art to make that sense tangible
and, thus, bearable.

Or do we entertain this striving in order to imagine ourselves different,
to have an afterlife waiting so as to finally escape from the innate
cruelty that has us killing one another for neither cause nor satisfaction?
Is art-the expression of communal and individual imagination-but a
whistling as we pass through the plundered and littered cemeteries of the
killing fields?

Not only Africa, but in some ways the whole world, is in turmoil.
Powerful forces are redesigning the frontiers of morality or simply
erasing them in the name of "security," "faith," and "civilization." We
are all of us creaking and cracking under the pressure of globalized
greed and a homicidal lust for power draped in the pious pretensions
and the moth-eaten purple cloak of "One-God" religion or "democracy."
Democracy is killing us; at the very least we are choking as it is
stuffed down our ungrateful throats.

A gorged goose will eventually gag on the good garbage presented
as the substance of the right to happiness.

Is this manipulation by the greedy? Or are we to assume that the
cataclysms I talk about, like templates pressing against one another, are
but blind forces of history fortuitously accompanied by cliché-spouting
generals and "dry drunk" presidents who, like flies on the coach, brag and
smirk about the dust they're raising in the Iraqi desert?

Africa is part of the world-as subject, not as actor. Africa is defined
by its weaknesses. The bane of Africa's public life is the twisted relationship
between power and appearance: the less real power of
thought or of influence we have, the more important the appearances
and appurtenances of privilege become through posturing and protocol.
With the need to prance (really a camouflaged expression of impotence)
come hyperbole, grandstanding, demagoguery, the manipulation
of myth and prejudice, graft and corruption and nepotism. Our presidents
try to rinse the blood from their tunics and promote themselves
from warlords to living effigies of the idols as if they could thereby incarnate
the masks of the ancestors. And they do so in the name of cultural
exceptionality. (If only we could exile and confine them to the
glass encasements of that show I saw in Rio de Janeiro!)

The excuses for the parlous state are ready-made and cynical: historical
processes, injustice and inequality in the world, and especially
racism. (Note: I'm not saying these factors do not exist; I'm just refusing
to accept them as faits accomplis, as intractable matter that cannot be
molded and overcome.)